DURING his leadership of the National Farmers’ Union Sir Ben Gill presided over two of the worst periods in modern farming history.

Published: 00:00, Sat, May 17, 2014

Gill believed that slaughtering infected animals was the solution to the foot-and-mouth epidemic[REX]

As such he gained a reputation as a formidable fighter for farmers, helping to guide them through the 1996 BSE crisis and the 2001 foot-and-mouth outbreak.

Although the European Union’s 1996 ban on exports of British beef happened two years before he was appointed the president of the NFU, Gill spent much of his tenure trying to get it overturned. It was finally lifted in 2006.

If that crisis proved devastating to the nation’s farmers the 2001 foot-and-mouth epidemic was catastrophic.

An EU ban was placed on all British exports of livestock, meat and animal products, footpaths were closed in a bid to halt the spread of the highly contagious disease and more than 10 million sheep and cattle ended up being slaughtered.

Gill believed that the wholesale slaughter of infected animals was the solution.

Others, including the Prince of Wales and the Soil Association, favoured vaccination but Gill countered that this response wasn’t 100 per cent foolproof and would take too long to implement.

After much debate prime minister Tony Blair agreed with Gill that a mass cull was the best option.

There were inevitably animals slaughtered that needn’t have been but you have to be hard to be kind

Sir Ben Gill in 2011

Nevertheless the scale of the decisions Gill took in 2001 weighed heavy on his mind.

“The people who were vociferous in favour of vaccination thought I didn’t give a damn and made all sorts of claims that I didn’t understand the subject,” he said in 2011.

“There were inevitably animals slaughtered that needn’t have been but you have to be hard to be kind.

"It is a fact that we stamped out disease.”

The only son of a farmer, Arthur Benjamin Norman Gill was born in York and studied agriculture at St John’s College, Cambridge, before working in Uganda for three years where he established a working school farm.

Under Idi Amin’s dictatorship life could be precarious.

“I was at the wrong end of a machine gun three times and talking your way out of that with a drunken soldier is not easy,” he later recalled.

On returning to the UK he worked as a farm manager in East Yorkshire for two years before taking over the family farm in Easingwold in 1978.

In 2006 he sold the farm but kept the house and outbuildings to create the Hawkhills Consultancy, which advises the agrifood industry and the renewable energy sector.

Gill later moved to Herefordshire and became chairman of Visit Herefordshire.

He was appointed a CBE in 1996 and knighted in 2004.

He died from a form of blood cancer and is survived by his wife Lady Carolyn, and four sons.